The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

After more than 3 years in Amsterdam, I am still entertained by the small cars that are a perfect fit for a busy city with small streets and limited parking. I often see small cars that are available in the USA, such as the Mini, BMW i3, Fiat 500, and the Smart car. But we also have (starting from the red one): Aixam cars, the Toyota iQ (the photo I have is of a bigger Toyota), Fiat Panda, Brio Bolt (the only 100% electric one listed here), Canta (mostly used by the elderly in Amsterdam), Volkswagen Up, Mitsubishi Mirage, and the Citroen C1 (the blue one).

I find it interesting that most of them are a similar size as my 1992 Honda Civic SI hatchback. So maybe I was ready to live in Europe 30 years ago!

Another 16km today, but much more up and down which was good, because we were covered by the trees and not in open fields too often. It got up to 28C today, so we were happy to be in the shade if the trees.

on the hike, we came across a castle, Riesling vineyards, apple and walnut trees. The green thing sliced open in the photos is a walnut tree.

We hiked today across farmland and forests, on a mostly marked trail for about 5 & 1/2 hours, but over an hour of that was at a pub for lunch. My watch tells me we did about 26000 steps.

We are now the proud owners of an all-electric car! Our 2020 VW e-Golf in a metallic blue with pretty much all the fun features we can get. For us, it is a 2-seater, because as Piper is demonstrating, the back will probably always be set up for the dogs.

Notice the VW emblem in the back lifts up when in reverse, because that’s where the backup camera is located.

Lorie got to drive it out of the dealer’s showroom, which was the first time we drove the car. We drove others to test, but not this specific one since it was in storage somewhere until the day we picked it up.

We checked out North Amsterdam today and discovered a number of cute neighborhoods and open space. We might need to check out the dog parks there one of these weekends. It’s much less crowded than our neighborhood.

Yep, even here in the canals

In various neighborhoods in Amsterdam, you can bring your plant scraps to these community composting bins. The city sets them up, and they’re limited to a certain number of neighbors; all of whom are given the combination to the padlock to add to it. Although it looks like anyone could open the bottom to pull out the ready-to-use compost.

This one is near a park we bring the dogs too on weekend mornings, Saraphatipark. The city considers it full at 26 households using it.

The city seems to partner with Wormenhotel (worm hotel), which helps a number of cities in the Netherlands install and manage 108 of these things around the country.